Apigee in the News

With backing from former US CTO Aneesh Chopra, Apigee is trying to make healthcare access easier. The API developer is rolling out a new platform that helps bridge some of the interoperability gaps when it comes to electronic healthcare records.

What do McDonald’s, John Lewis and Amazon have in common? They’re all companies that were created to take advantage of change – whether it’s societal change, supply chain advances or the arrival of e-commerce. Their founders built visionary businesses that disrupted their respective industries and the established players that had created those industries.

If you chose your PC in the 1990s because you wanted specific software applications (and not based on how much you liked the operating system), or if you made the jump to an iPhone from a Blackberry a few years back, chances are a successful platform strategy won you over.

People are checking their phones more than ever. The average person checks their phone 150 times a day — up from 110 just two years ago, according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report. Why? The majority of phone checks come from looking at the time, reading text messages or getting social media updates. Most of this obsessive checking can seem pretty trivial.

One of the key observations about the difference between big data sources and those traditionally used by enterprise applications is the strength of the signal. As Anant Jhingran, VP Products of Apigee, pointed out in an interview a while back, traditional enterprise applications use data that has super strong signals, while big data usually has a low signal to noise ratio.

Getting an API design right demands far more than just figuring out which calls should do what. Public APIs — APIs meant to be used by people other than their creators — present a special set of challenges that can inform all API design. Even private APIs often find themselves with unexpected users, and can last far longer than was planned. Apigee faced the special challenge of creating a marquee API, an API for managing its APIs.

Competition apart, businesses are increasingly becoming interdependent, bringing together the best of services. The food app from Yelp not only publishes crow-sourced reviews about restaurants, but brings online reservations service through SeatMe and food delivery service through Eat24, offering customers a connected experience.

According to venture capitalist Mary Meeker, the average person now checks their phone 150 times a day (up from 110 just two years ago). Of those 150 times, messaging occupies 23, time checking 18, and the rest are largely distributed between checking and posting on social media.

However, in amongst those statistics, potentially the most important metric is missing – how many times do we check our phone for a positive behaviour change?